Introducing Sarah: Why I joined EBD
I’ve spent the last 12 years living in Mexico, teaching the Bible to women, supported by CMS Australia. My husband, Peter, was the director of MOCLAM, training pastors throughout the Spanish speaking world and our three daughters grew up in Mexico. We returned permanently to Australia in June 2020 and we are now re-learning Australian culture.
There are many shifts in Australian culture that strike me more jarringly due to my extended absence, and my emersion in another culture, and one of those is the extent of the gender confusion in Australian society. Simultaneously, gender seems to be everything (aggressive pushing of feminism) and nothing (gender fluidity and arguing for no distinction between men and women). How is it possible to have both simultaneously? It’s not. But in the confusion of needing to make up your own understanding of gender and what it means to be male or female (or neither), it’s not surprising that confusion and inconsistency reign.
This pervading air of confusion has led me to delight more and more in the beauty of God’s wonderful design of the relationship between men and women: perfectly complementary and clear in distinct roles. God’s word is good, and I trust it to give me what is best for me, and best for our world. The Bible gives me the pattern of both men and women equally being made in the image of God, and equal in worth and in relationship with God. But it’s the differences between men and women which enable them to be one flesh in marriage, and to contribute so richly and distinctively in the church, and in society more broadly. Those differences are precious and God-given. It’s the clarity of the Biblical model of men and women which is a balm in the midst of gender confusion.
Perhaps a longer explanation of my experience of the role of men and women in Mexico will help to highlight the beauty I see in the complementarian position.
In many ways the conservative culture of Mexico, largely shaped by strong roots in the Roman Catholic church, leads to a position that is much closer to the complementarian position than is widely held in Australia. Men are seen as the head of the family and most commonly the head of the church.
However, the dominant culture of machismo is a sad distortion of God’s good design. In machismo, women are seen as being inferior to men, and it’s their role to serve the men for the pleasure of men. To be a real man, it is seen as his right to put women down, to have nothing to do with household tasks or anything perceived as “women’s work” and commonly to have mistresses. A sad reality in Mexico is that the abuse of women is so “normal” that until very recently there was no significant voice trying to change it. Only a few years ago there was a public education campaign that said, “Abuse against women is not normal”. The only reason that that was the slogan was because the dominant view was the opposite. In 2018, femicides (murder of women) in Mexico were 7 per day. Last year, the rate was 10 per day. In March 2020, after two particularly gruesome attacks on women, at long last, there were the first widespread protests about the appalling violence against women.
Critics of complementarianism sometimes draw a straight line of causality between these tragic statistics and the complementarian viewpoint, which they characterise as “the permanent subjugation of women”. But this is a straw-man argument. The biblical complementarian view is not about the permanent subjugation of women. This may be an accurate description of what happens in Mexico, but it is not biblical complementarianism. The point at which Mexican machismo is a flagrant distortion of God’s complementary design is that it fails to see women as equal. Equal in God’s eyes. Equal in dignity and worth. Equal in competency, intelligence and skill. Machismo focuses solely on the different, and completely ignores the equal. It also fails to see that a complementary role of men and women requires self-sacrificial, Christ-shaped leadership by a husband for the benefit of those under his care (Eph. 5:21–33). Mexican machismo is purely one direction, and not for the benefit of the women.
Australians can all too easily look at the horrors of Mexican machismo and reject it completely for the sake of trumpeting the equality of men and women. But that has the danger of falling off the log on the other side. To uphold the equality of men and women and completely ignore the differences between men and women is to miss out on the benefits of the ideal complementary design that God gives us. The essential components of biblical manhood and womanhood are to see that men and women are both equal AND different. To lose either one is to distort God’s ideal. To hold onto both equality and difference is to shine with complementary beauty.
So as I return to Australia, and swim in different cultural waters, I feel saddened by the gender confusion of our world and it distresses me to hear the high levels of blame and hurt many people have about gender. But I know that the only thing that can change our broken and hurting world is the gospel. As such, I want to work towards helping people hear the life-giving words of the Bible. Knowing Jesus and trusting his word to guide us as we wait for his return is the only basis for hope. So, I’ve joined Equal But Different to add my small “grano de arena” (grain of sand) in helping people to trust God’s word and delight in God’s good design of men and women as equal but different.
Sarah Sholl, with her husband Peter and 3 daughters, spent 12 years in Mexico with CMS. Her great delight in those years was reading the Bible with women, talking about Jesus and seeing women grow in their understanding of grace, and training Bible study leaders.
Before that she was doing much the same as a minister’s wife in Sydney. Now a member of Summer Hill Church, she continues to read the Bible with women, mostly CMS missionaries on home assignment.